Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user interface management and more particularly to information integration into a dashboard view.
Description of the Related Art
The personal computer revolution of the twentieth century enabled new levels of productivity for those who chose to adopt the personal computer as a principal platform for time management. From the outset, personal information managers have been a mainstay of personal computing. Generally, a personal information manager provides computing logic to create and maintain tasks, activities and meetings, and contacts through a simple, easy to use interface. To meet the needs of those with a vast number of tasks and meetings, summary “journal” user interface views allow the end user to view all tasks and meetings in a single screen. Further, in order to call attention to entries of importance or urgency, end users can sort meetings and tasks by due date and can render the most urgent and important of entries in a different color.
Organizational experts recognize the deficient nature of the journal view of a personal information manager in the face of an unmanageable volume of important and urgent entries. In particular, the journal view does little to prevent important events from becoming obscured by other organizational elements in the journal display. Accordingly, leading experts recommend the use of a grid in which activities are arranged by importance and urgency. In this way, at a glance, viewers can focus only on activities of importance, only on activities which are urgent, or only on activities which are both important and urgent.
Yet, the grid expressed by organizational experts provides only for the arrangement of activities and does not account for other types of organizational elements and non-organizational information elements. To that end, understanding the nature of an important or urgent organization element like a task or meeting often can require a visualization of a relationship between the organizational elements and other non-organizational, informational elements. For instance, it is often not enough to recognize the urgency of a scheduled meeting, but it may also be necessary to visualize contacts scheduled to attend the meeting, or resources necessary to conduct the meeting, or tasks that are pre-requisite to the meeting.
The grid system of the state of the art, however, manages only a unitary type of organizational element—namely the activity. Generally, these activities can be found from within a singular source. The reality of the modern workflow, however, is that scheduled organizational elements seldom arise in a vacuum and most often rely upon other information objects. Further, these information objects can be provided by different information sources. Yet, in order to marshal other types of information objects into a single view, end users must revert then to a traditional journal view.